Proactive Wellness Centers, PLC Empowers Patients with Electronic Access to Personal Health Records

PR Log (Press Release) – Oct 14, 2009 – Proactive Wellness Centers, PLC, a Washington DC metropolitan area regional leader in anti-aging medicine and bioidentical hormone therapy (BHRT) launches its all new “ePatientPortal”.  The ePatientPortal marks a critical step towards fully empowering patients with the information they need to make informed health care decisions.   Dr. Lynese Lawson is the practice’s founder, medical director and practicing physician and is passionate about patient education and empowerment.  “For many of my patients, their appointment with me is the first time a physician actually explained every test, its purpose, the optimal ranges and discussed all of the results in detail”, says Lawson.

The ePatientPortal provides secure, electronic access to a patient's Quest lab results, and provides numerous self-service functions including online appointment scheduling, demographic profile maintenance and access to their financial transaction detail with the practice.  “We serve an extremely tech-savvy patient population and have received great reception to technology that makes it easier for patients to interact with our practice, says Andre Etherly, Chief Strategy Officer for the practice. "We see the ePatientPortal as an important step that continues our leadership in the use of technology that enables an improved patient experience with our practice."

Technically, the access to the patient’s Quest lab results is provided through a linkage with Quest’s Care360 network.  Patient’s get their view into this data by signing up with either Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault, two of the leading offerings in the emerging market for personal health record services.  Both are free services that allow individuals to subscribe, then link available data into their own electronic health information store.  Through the ePatientPortal, patient’s request access to their data and a personalized PIN is provided to them.  With their PIN, they can use a specially designated url to securely link their health record data into the service of their choice. “Personal health records are here to stay and our practice intends to leverage this technology as much as possible to ensure that all of our patients are VIP’s (very informed patients)”, says Dr. Lawson. “As patients become educated, they are able to be their own best advocate and that is one of the goals we try to achieve with every patient.”

The ePatientPortal was developed by eMedicalFusion, LLC (http://www.emedicalfusion.com) a Virginia company that specializes in building integration technology that enables physician enterprises to operate at peak efficiency.  Proactive Wellness Centers uses the entire suite of technology developed by eMedicalFusion to provide easy to use self-service capabilities to its patients.

The practice anticipates that Labcorp will soon offer a similar capability and that the availability of data that can be delivered to patients via the electronic channel will increase exponentially over the next several months.  "We plan to continue to be a leader, so stay tuned, says Etherly.